use an email address in a Filter expression in a Get Contacts action

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Posted on by mobilismexico

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I want to filter the output of a Get Contacts action by the email address.

Opposed to other properties, the actual email address is nested inside an array-based emailAddresses property:

"emailAddresses": [
{
"name": "Joe Doe",
"address": "joe.doe@company.com"
}
]

I asked Copilot how to use the "address" part of the emailAddresses result, and its response was: emailaddress1, so in the Filter Query field I used the expression:

emailaddress1 eq variables('sender')

I have also used the expression

emailAddresses.address eq variables('sender')

None of that works. Any advice on how to build my Filter Query?

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Mark Nanneman 991 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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emailAddresses is an array so you can't use it in the Odata filter. My recommendation would be to use a different property to filter on, like "displayName"

e.g.

displayName eq 'Contact Name'

Another thing you could do is use a "Filter Array" on the output of your Get contacts (V2)

Then you can check if the first (or last) emailAddresses/address is equal to your filter email address.

e.g.

first(item()?['emailAddresses'])?['address']

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Power Platform Developer | LinkedIn: Mark Nanneman | Blog: Power Stuff | YouTube: Mark's Power Stuff

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mobilismexico 261 on at

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I understand that the array as a whole could not be used in the Filter Query expression, but the array always contains only two known elements, name and address. The Filter Query should be able to use one of those elements as the "column" name for building the expression.

The Filter Array action would only work when the number of results is under the limit of 999 elements.

I appreciate your reply, though.

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Mark Nanneman 991 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Well you learn something new every day! Turns out that you can work with nested arrays in an Odata filter using a Lambda function

https://www.odata.org/getting-started/basic-tutorial/#lambda

if you use this filter it will return items with an address that equals whatever you put in. I haven't gotten it to work with contains or endswith unfortunately.

emailAddresses/any(s:s/address eq 'john.doe@gmail.com')

Give it a try

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mobilismexico 261 on at

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thank you, @Mark Nanneman,

this did the trick:

emailAddresses/any(s:s/address eq 'john.doe@gmail.com')

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